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Through support of a University Transportation Research Center Faculty Development Minigrant an investigation was made into the use of RFID based sensing technologies for transportation purposes. Transportation applications would potentially include the wireless detection of overweight trucks, remote and automated emissions monitoring of vehicles, corrosion of infrastructure and transportation security applications. Sustainable transportation would be improved through savings realized by a reduction in the cost of sensor technologies as well as the significant cost savings and environmental impacts realized by reducing the damage to roads and bridges by the efficient detection of overweight trucks, a reduction in the number of vehicles with emissions violations, in-situ detection of infrastructure corrosion to enable just in time maintenance and improved safety of mass transit. Commercially available RFID tags cost $0.1 and are being used in a wide range of applications including, shipping, warehouse management among others. Recently Wake Inc. has developed methods for incorporation of RFID tags into concrete structures for in-situ measurement of the curing process. While these tags cost more than $0.1, due to the enhanced packaging, they are able to measure the temperature of concrete structures to determine when the structure has cured. Typical protocols require that concrete "cure" for a mandatory 28 days so that its maximum strength is achieved. However depending on the local temperatures, humidity, concrete volume etc., concrete may achieve this maximum strength in just several days. Thus, through the use of the RFID sensors, construction of transportation related infrastructure can proceed at a much faster pace and realize significant savings by reopening major routes, bridges or runways at earlier dates. While Wake Inc. has demonstrated this in several instances, including the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, there are further improvements to be made to this technology by incorporating new sensing capabilities into RFID tags.

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